Today, many popular electronic devices, such as personal digital assistants (“PDAs”) and hand-held media players or portable electronic devices (“PEDs”), are battery powered and include various user interface components. Conventionally, such portable electronic devices include buttons, dials, or touchpads to control the media devices and to allow users to navigate through media assets, including, e.g., music, speech, or other audio, movies, photographs, interactive art, text, etc., resident on (or accessible through) the media devices, to select media assets to be played or displayed, and/or to set user preferences for use by the media devices. The functionality supported by such portable electronic devices is increasing. At the same time, these media devices continue to get smaller and more portable. Consequently, as such devices get smaller while supporting robust functionality, there are increasing difficulties in providing adequate user interfaces for the portable electronic devices.
Some user interfaces have taken the form of graphical user interfaces or displays which, when coupled with other interface components on the device, allow users to navigate and select media assets and/or set user preferences. However, such graphical user interfaces or displays may be inconvenient, small, or unusable. Other devices have completely done away with a graphical user display.
One problem encountered by users of portable devices that lack a graphical display relates to difficulty in identifying the audio content being presented via the device. This problem may also be encountered by users of portable electronic devices that have a graphical display, for example, when the display is small, poorly illuminated, or otherwise unviewable.
Thus, there is a need to provide users of portable electronic devices with non-visual identification of media content delivered on such devices.